Tech Fails: The Year’s Most Ridiculous Moments in Technology

The tech industry moves so fast that it’s hard to keep up with just how much has happened this year. We’ve watched as the tech elite enmeshed themselves in the U.S. government, AI companies sparred for dominance, and futuristic tech like smart glasses and robotaxis became a bit more tangible outside of the San Francisco bubble. You know, important stuff that’s going to impact our lives for years to come.

But the tech world is brimming with so many big personalities that there’s always something really dumb going on, which understandably gets overshadowed by “real news” when the entire internet breaks, or TikTok gets sold, or there’s a massive data breach or something. So, as the news (hopefully) slows down for a bit, it’s time to catch up on the dumbest moments you missed – don’t worry, only one of them involves toilets.

Mark Zuckerberg, a bankruptcy lawyer from Indiana, filed a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta.

It’s not Mark Zuckerberg’s fault that his name is Mark Zuckerberg. But, like millions of other business owners, Mark Zuckerberg bought Facebook ads to promote his legal practice to potential clients. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page continually received unwarranted suspensions for impersonating Mark Zuckerberg. So, Mark Zuckerberg took legal action because he had to pay for advertisements during his suspension, even though he didn’t break any rules.

This has been an ongoing frustration for Mark Zuckerberg, who has been practicing law since Mark Zuckerberg was three years old. Mark Zuckerberg even created a website, iammarkzuckerberg.com, to explain to his potential clients that he is not Mark Zuckerberg.

“I can’t use my name when making reservations or conducting business as people assume I’m a prank caller and hang up,” he wrote on his website. “My life sometimes feels like the Michael Jordan ESPN commercial, where a regular person’s name causes constant mixups.”

Meta’s lawyers are probably very busy, so it may take a while for Mark Zuckerberg to find out how this will shake out. But boy, oh boy, you bet I scheduled a calendar reminder for the next filing deadline in this case (it’s February 20, in case you’re wondering).

It all started when Mixpanel founder Suhail Doshi posted on X to warn fellow entrepreneurs about a promising engineer named Soham Parekh. Doshi had hired Parekh to work for his new company, then quickly realized he was working for several companies at once.

“I fired this guy in his first week and told him to stop lying / scamming people. He hasn’t stopped a year later. No more excuses,” Doshi wrote on X.

It turned out that Doshi wasn’t alone – he said that just that day, three founders had reached out to thank him for the warning, since they were currently employing Parekh.

To some, Parekh was a morally bereft cheat, exploiting startups for quick cash. To others, he was a legend. Ethics aside, it’s really impressive to get jobs at that many companies, since tech hiring can be so competitive.

“Soham Parekh needs to start an interview prep company. He’s clearly one of the greatest interviewers of all time,” Chris Bakke, who founded the job-matching platform Laskie, wrote on X. “He should publicly acknowledge that he did something bad and course correct to the thing he’s top 1% at.”

Parekh admitted that he was, indeed, guilty of working for multiple companies at once. But there are still some unanswered questions about his story – he claims that he was lying to all of these companies to make money, yet he regularly opted for more equity than cash in his compensation packages (equity can take years to vest, and Parekh was getting fired pretty quickly). What was really going on there? Soham, if you wanna talk, my DMs are open.

Tech CEOs get a lot of flack, but it’s usually not for their cooking. But when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined the Financial Times (FT) for its “Lunch with the FT” series. Bryce Elder, an FT writer, noticed something horribly wrong in the video of Sam Altman making pasta: he was bad at olive oil.

Altman used olive oil from the trendy brand Graza, which sells two olive oils: Sizzle, which is for cooking, and Drizzle, which is for topping. That’s because olive oil loses its flavor when heated, so you don’t want to waste your fanciest bottle to saute something when you could put it in a salad dressing and fully appreciate it. This more flavorful olive oil is made from early harvest olives, which have a more potent flavor, but are more expensive to cultivate.

As Elder puts it, “His kitchen is a catalogue of inefficiency, incomprehension, and waste.”

Elder’s article is meant to be funny, yet he connects Altman’s haphazard cooking style with OpenAI’s excessive, unrepentant use of natural resources. I enjoyed it so much that I included it on a syllabus for a workshop I taught to high school students about bringing personality into journalistic writing. Then, I did what we in the industry (and people on tumblr) call a “reblog” and wrote about #olivegate, pointing back to the FT’s source text.

Sam Altman’s fans got very mad at me! This critique of his cooking probably created more controversy than anything else I wrote this year.